Many Google AdWords users are reporting a change in the Google Keyword Tool. Competition data is now showing a ranking between High, Medium, and Low instead of the green bar that you used to see when you searched for terms.
Until today, the green bar represented how competitive the keyword was in Google AdWords. You could more or less calculate based on how much green you would see a figure between 1-10.
Now with the High, Medium and Low rating scale you can see how Google ranks their keyword competitiveness based only by three metrics. These are shown in a text based description where it no longer shows the competitiveness in green.
While everything has been replaced by the High, Medium, and Low text you can still login to Google and download a report to get the exact number that the green bar used to represent. This should be given to you in a number figure as it always has. It’s not said if the download feature will last but for now it still reports the same data that you could see before.
For anyone that follows this or uses it daily to determine keyword competition you will now only be able to see High, Medium and Low that represent:
- Low — Competitiveness in AdWords is under .33
- Medium — Competitiveness in AdWords between .33 and .66
- High — Competitiveness in AdWords is over .67
All data that is shown is related directly to AdWords data, costs, and competitiveness and not organic search in general. The more competition there is, the higher the rating will be. Here are the Top 20 most expensive AdWords keywords. The top keyword is “Insurance” being at a high level and average cost per CPC around $54.91 per click.
This new change, like other changes in AdWords in the past couple of weeks is a step to make AdWords easier for business to use. Now instead of going to AdWords and having to figure out what the green bar means, Google gives you a very easy to read metric. For those of us that use AdWords Keyword tool on a daily basis, it just takes one more step to figure out exactly what we want to see.